Join incompatibility between RHEL 6 and RHEL 7

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7
  • coreutils-8.4-46.el6 or older

Issue

Our users report incompatibility in join command between RHEL 6 and RHEL 7.

  • On RHEL 6:
# echo a b | join -v 2 -1 1 -2 2 /dev/null -
a b
  • On RHEL7:
# echo a b | join -v 2 -1 1 -2 2 /dev/null -
b a

This leads to unexpected scripts behaviour

Resolution

Update to coreutils-8.4-47.el6 released with Advisory RHBA-2018:1862 or newer.

Root Cause

There had been a join bug in coreutils since the very beginning, fixed in coreutils-8.10, see corresponding changelog record:

join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]

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